Michele’s Favorite Keyers

Speaking of keyers, I have three favorites that you may be interested in checking out. There are tons of keyers on the market but not all of them give me everything that I want (and Jeremy and I did write the book on keying – See the image on the right!)

Red Giant Keying Suite – Includes Red Giant Primatte and Key Correct

In this series, I’m going to give some in-depth information on three of my favorite keying tools that work with After Effects, Premiere Pro, and other tools. The first in the series covers Red Giant’s Keying Suite, which includes Primatte Keyer, Key Correct Pro, and Warp.

Digital Film Tools zMatte

A full-featured keyer that is the result of our experience in creating hundreds of successful blue and green screen composites.

Using proprietary matte extraction techniques, zMatte quickly and simply creates mattes with minimal parameters even if you are dealing with fine hair detail, smoke, or reflections. It is easy to use, yet provides the needed tools when faced with good, bad, or ugly shots — tools such as multiple matte creations, automatic spill suppression, sophisticated matte and edge manipulation, and color correction.

Written with the indie filmmaker in mind ‘Greenscreen Made Easy’ follows a beautifully logical path through the entire process of pre-production, production and post-production from buying or building your greenscreen (or blue, and it explains that as well) through shooting your backgrounds, lighting for greenscreen, positioning your actors, techniques for clean keys, prepping for post-production, getting rid of artifacts, different plug-ins, blending, colouring, making it believable and using CGI backgrounds.

Indie filmmaker and reviewer Ryan Graham gave Jeremy Hanke and Michele Yamazaki the coveted MicroFilmmaker Magazine’s Award of Superiority in his insightful review of GreenScreen Made Easy!

If you’re even vaguely considering using green screening in an upcoming low-budget production, don’t think twice about buying this book as soon as possible, preferably before you even start writing your script. In fact, I’d highly recommend it to any indie filmmaker, because even if you’ve never thought of using a green screen before, Hanke and Yamazaki might inspire you to take your ideas to ambitious new levels. Let this book and the awesome and affordable technology it describes inspire you to dream big regardless of your budget. – Ryan Graham, MicroFilmmaker Magazine, 9.6 out of 10

Want an introduction to the art of GreenScreen? Look no further than Jeremy Hanke & Michele Yamazaki’s GreenScreen Made Easy. It gets an 8/10.

Not bad! As far as the comment about the software going out of date, that’s an issue with any book that discusses software. We plan to write follow up editions to address new software and new techniques we come across.